Free The Official Essex Sisters Companion Guide by Jody Gayle with Eloisa James

Gabe enthusiastically said yes?”
    “At the time, yes.”
    He shook his head. “You wouldn’t have gone through with it.”
    “I would!” Imogen said fiercely. “You don’t know how much—”
    “How much you wish to be desired,” Rafe said, for her.
    She swallowed. He plucked her hand away from the sheet and turned the palm to his mouth. “You and I are birds of a feather, you know. So much did you long to be desired, so much did I. I wanted you to desire me, from the very moment I saw you. But you never seemed to look my direction: first there was Draven, and then Gabe. I hadn’t your courage. I played the role of a coward in all this, Imogen. I should have thrown away that mustache and lusted after you under my own name.”
    “Why didn’t you?” Her question sounded shy, almost hesitant.
    His laugh was a bark. “I dreamed of it. I almost—the words were on my lips a hundred times. But I couldn’t. What did I have to offer you, Imogen? Nothing. Gabe is—”
    “Gabe is in all ways a worthy gentleman, but he bores me, and you know it.” She spoke to the question in his eyes. “From that moment in the carriage I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t let myself bring it into words. The thought was too painful. Later, I asked you to take me to Draven’s house. We kissed in the field, and I kept comparing the way the man I thought was Gabe kissed, to the way you had kissed me, and trying to convince myself that I could feel . . . that . . . for two men practically on the same day.”
    “Vixen,” he muttered. And: “But, Imogen, when did you look at me and say, this is Rafe ?”
    The desperation in his voice filled Imogen’s heart with joy once again. She rolled just next to him and put her arms around his neck. “Five minutes ago?”
    He growled at her.
    “Yesterday?”
    He blinked down at her. “I thought . . .”
    She ran her hands through his hair, smiling up at the male foolishness of him. “You took my hand at the theater, just before the pantomime began.”
    “So?”
    She said it patiently. “Gabe is a scholar.”
    He didn’t seem to understand, so she sat up and pulled him upright as well. Then she took his hand and turned it over. Callused from holding the reins, large and powerful, it looked nothing like the soft hand of a scholar. Something lightened in his face.
    “So when we made love—”
    “Rafe, did it never occur to you that I might have recognized your body from that bath I gave you?”
    “My body?”
    “Well, parts of it?” There was a husky tone to her voice that made all parts of his body spring to attention.
    “But I was wearing a towel,” he said.
    She laughed.
    “So you recognized my hands before my . . . other parts.” He looked down at them. “I do read books, sometimes,” he observed.
    “So do I,” she said demurely. “When there’s nothing else to do.”
    “I think I shall keep you too busy to read.”
    She raised her eyes to his. “It will take a great deal of children, Rafe, to keep me too busy for you.”
    He smiled but—“Are you sure you love me?” It burst from his chest. “I can’t help feeling that I don’t deserve you. I’m like a—a worn-out shoe, Imogen. I daren’t drink champagne at our own wedding! I’m—”
    “You are one of the most loving, most responsible, and most generous men I’ve ever met. In fact, I didn’t think your kind walked this earth. And you—you are for me , Rafe. Just you. Not Draven, not Gabe. Just you.”
    There was a moment of silence, one of those moments that pass between a husband and his wife and change the way they live together, the way they laugh together, the way they argue together . . . forever.
    “I hated you for drinking,” she said, putting her lips to his palm. “I wanted to kill you for it. I hated you . . . and I loved you. And I was too much of a fool to see that the only thing that really mattered to me was keeping you alive.”
    Rafe’s eyes shone—perhaps with tears, perhaps